Not Very Deep Thoughts Says Howdy!

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Stories should take you somewhere. Let you listen in to conversations. Sit in places you wouldn't normally sit, introduce you to characters you don't know. You've opened the door, so pull up a story, let it loose on that big screen in your head. Enjoy.

Month: March 2017

Lamar reached over the bar, picked up the remote, pushed the “return to last” button and CNN changed to a Spanish Language soap opera. He read the subtitles long enough to find out Ramon, the guy in the jet-black hairpiece, had been sleeping around on a very exotic looking woman with big, pouty lips who was pushing near R rated breast exposure in a seriously flimsy blouse. He punched in the Weather Channel. He knew all about last night’s storms because that was all every local station covered with their roaming interns standing in front of trashed houses interviewing old ladies with pocket dogs and tattooed chainsaw men who spit tobacco. He pushed the number he thought would give him a Hart to Hart rerun on the oldies channel and got Mr. Rogers on PBS. He set the remote down.

Neeko reached in front of him, put the remote back behind the bar. “Reagan’s gonna look up, see that sweater and know it was you.”

“Only place I can think of where the neighborhood is having a lovely day. And he’s dead, so what’s that say?”

“Fred was a hell of a piano player. Always wanted a pair of his slippers.”

“My dad had his sweater. Not the same, somehow.”

“Would you have wanted Mr. Rogers for your dad?”

Lamar pushed the bowl of Low Sodium pretzels towards Neeko. “No. We had a train set, though. Wasn’t very magical. Dad kept changing up the layout and cussin’ when there was a short in the track somewhere. Only ran right about half the time.”

“Sounds like the government.” Neeko made a face and pushed the pretzels back. “Things taste like cardboard, Lamar. We didn’t have a train set at my house, but I was told by my mother that my sisters pooped rose petals and all girls were princesses. And that we should all try to get along and do something constructive with our day. I think she might have been Mrs. Rogers.”

“That’s it right there. Do something constructive.” Lamar waited until the handful of cardboard pretzels he’d popped were gone. “Damn I’m sick of politics. Everything is push back. People trying to push the culture back fifty years, people having duck shit hissy fits about keeping things they didn’t want five or ten or twenty years ago. Enough, you know? Shut up, put the phone down, go to work, fix it.”

Reagan draped her bar towel over her shoulder, leaned both hands on the bar. “I go to the kitchen to see why it was taking them fifteen minutes to get a gourmet hamburger out during business lunch and what do I find? You two still here and Mr. Rogers. Jesus, Lamar. I thought you were a Hart to Hart man.”

“I’m a Rockford man, actually.”

“A clumsy, inept, step on your dick then shoot yourself in the foot three times getting where you need to go man? Sounds like our government to me.” She looked around the bar, none of the lunch stragglers were paying attention to the televisions. She picked up the remote from behind the beer taps, pointed it at the cable box and switched back to the soap, set the remote down on the back bar out of reach. When she turned back she caught the looks from Neeko and Lamar. “What? They wear the best clothes on this one. I wonder if guys in Mexico really walk around in bullfighter pants like the Mariachi’s at El Fenix, only without shirts.”

“According to the girl with all the hair and not much blouse they all have one or two too many girlfriends.” Lamar drained his lemonade, picked up a few more low sodium pretzels.

“It’s the bullfighter pants.” Neeko winked at Reagan. “Makes them irresistible. Maybe we should get you a pair, Lamar. They’re so tight it would give you something to bitch about besides politics. And the extra girlfriends would put your wife right up your butt.”

“Funny guy. I’m not bitching about politics, I’m tired of hearing about politics. It sounds like an unsupervised grade school playground. Like they all need to watch Mr. Rogers, get on the train, get their shit sorted in the magic kingdom and realize they’re getting paid to run the country, not tweet their brain farts and refuse to engage in some kind of constructive dialogue. All the talking heads and their bullshit opinions and speculating and theorizing. They’re no better than the Ancient Aliens people. We don’t know how it got this fucked up, we can’t seem to fix it, so we’ll blame it on each other or little green men or immigrants or the Russians or the right or the left and it’s just a giant babbling blame fest.”

Reagan wiped the bar with one hand, gave Lamar a fresh lemonade with the other. “It’s all over the internet. People unfriending each other, claiming to turn off the TV and stop the constant barrage and getting sucked right back in. I read where depression has cranked way up. It really is almost too much non-information.”

Neeko held up his empty glass for a refill. “It is depressing when all you get from your leadership is drama and everywhere you look the ‘Oh me, oh my God, it’s the end of the world’ crowd gets into it. I unhooked from a lot of websites myself. Re-blogged hate and blame and conspiracies. Couldn’t handle it. Whine, whine, whine. The worst thing is nobody is trying to fix it. They just bitch and point fingers and whine. What’s so funny, Lamar?”

“I worked for a man one time…” He twirled the straw in his drink, slowly. “Let me back up. We had this guy, all he could do was complain. About everything. Manufacturing, marketing, admin. The dealers. Bitch, bitch, bitch. No solutions, just complaints. His whole world was a righteous, unproductive, incompetent mess that was everyone else’s fault and he let everybody know. He was a real no rainbows kind of guy. One day, after a couple years of that, we’re in a meeting and he doesn’t say a word. Not a damn thing except ‘thank you’. It was like we’d done a meeting and didn’t feel like we needed to Febreeze our brains when it was over.” Lamar hit his lemonade, chuckled a little.

“So?” Reagan cocked her head to the side. “A little long on fond workplace memories, way short on point. You need to take a nap, adjust your medication?”

“Right.” He pointed a finger pistol at Reagan, “Bang,” acted like it kicked. “I was in the owner’s office a couple of nights later, doing a midnight save-the-world over an expensive scotch meeting, and I mentioned Steve, the no rainbow guy’s, turnaround. Asked the boss if he had anything to do with it. He nodded, said ‘I told him a little story I like to tell when folks around here get all doomsday. When I’d just started this place we were broke, the bank here in town wouldn’t loan me the damn money to buy a van to run parts between two old barns we were using for plants back then. I was feelin’ mighty sorry for myself, close to throwin’ in the towel. I went to eat dinner out at my Daddy’s house. I bitched and moaned, told him how bleak my world was, how nobody gave a rat’s ass if I made it or not. I was just some crazy redneck boy with a soldering iron and I’d never amount to nothin’. Daddy, he thought a minute, said ‘Son, there’s always hope. You just have to figure out how to fix it.’ Well I bitched and moaned some considerable bit more and asked him, thinkin’ he’d tried to pass me on down the road with some light at the end of the tunnel platitude bullshit, ‘how the hell am I supposed figure that out, how to fix it?’ He looked at me like if was still young enough he’d have bent me over his knee, and he says ‘Don’t know how the hell you ever gonna see how to fix anything, boy.’ I was an upstart young smart aleck back then and I said ‘You know what my problem is, old man, why don’t you tell me?’ Well, Daddy just sat there, looked at me like I was dumbass personified. He popped the top on a nasty Falstaff, I remember this clear as the day it happened, and he pointed the foamy top of that can at me and said ‘You keep lookin’ at the world through shit colored glasses, son, what the hell do you expect to see?’”

The silence in their little circle was weightless. Reagan switched the television back to Mr. Rogers. “The only reason I put up with you two gents is the stories. You know that, right?”

“We tip okay, too. For disenfranchised old white guys who didn’t vote the way everyone thinks we did.”

“Voting is what matters. I need to put this place back together for dinner. Both of you, get out of here, put on your Mr. Rogers sweaters and go tell everyone what a lovely neighborhood it would be if they all voted.” She grinned, threw the bar towel at Lamar. “And clean their glasses while you’re at it.”

No small hat tip to Hartley PeaveyPhoto from the internet. If it’s yours, holler.

“Not as soon as we wanted. This one was spread out all over the place. Had to keep Dooce and Freemont out of each other’s way. Dooce played the same freakin’ guitar solo on like three tunes. We didn’t catch it till last night.”

She pulled a scoop out of a small bucket of water, bent over into the freezer. “The same? Really?”

“Close enough. Bobcat sent him to the woodshed with a thermos of double expresso Starbucks, a stack of old Benny Goodman jazz albums and a bag of some different weed. He’s been smoking the same shit since the Super Bowl party where he brought in his crop. We all think he needs to change his channel.” He glanced up for a second. “Gulls are noisy as all hell this afternoon.”

“It’s the stale chips box-lunch tourists.” She looked over his head, pointed with her chin. He turned, sure enough. The smoked glass limo bus had unloaded for lunch on the beach and the air was full of seagulls and the ground covered in tossed stale potato chips.

“I liked it better when they went straight to Disneyland. If they’re going to stop, they could pull up closer to your ice cream coach.”

“No thanks. Tourists, no English, all the pointing, the gulls pooping on everything and all that? Foreigners don’t tip for shit, anyway. I’ll live.”

He nodded agreement, watched Connie the ice cream truck girl embed walnuts into his French Vanilla ice cream. Listened to her talk about her dogs while she hammered nuts and ice cream into coexistence on a piece of marble tile. She really enjoyed her job and smiled a lot, always made it an enjoyable experience to buy ice cream from her. She’d told him once it was because a lot of things in her life got worked out on that piece of marble.

He thanked her, took the cone hand off, put a dollar in the tip jar and didn’t bother to look up when he backed away onto the sidewalk.

He heard the scream just before a violent collision sent him off across the grass rolled up in a ball of asses, knees and elbows with someone. Ten yards from their point of impact they ricocheted off a fifty-five-gallon drum-turned-trash-can and came to rest a few yards from it. He and whoever, they seemed to be made out of nothing but lightly oiled caramel colored velvet that smelled like coconut oil and flowers, were twisted into a human Rubik’s cube. And his left shoulder? Gaw-awd dammit. A female voice with a mild Russian accent was talking to his nose. She hadn’t lost her Doublemint gum in the collision and was calm, in spite of whatever had happened. She had great teeth and her nose, all of her he could really see, looked like the rest of her felt. Slightly oily.

“Nice to meet you, too, ice cream no pay attention boy. Dangerous, your way you meet girls. Just to say ‘Hey, girl,’ is too much? For you? You wave. Maybe I stop. Only maybe.” She unhooked from him, one arm and one leg at a time, from under and around him. She rolled out and away and ended up sitting cross legged and straight armed, hands on her knees. He was on his back, one knee up, his left shoulder on fire. She looked at him like he was some curiosity that had fallen out of the sky. A block of frozen pee from an airliner, or maybe a piece of Sputnik. She held out her hand.

“Nice to meet you.”

“You said that.”

“You forgot the polite way of how to meet a girl, no pay attention, no apology ice cream boy. So I try again for you. Taisia. Nice to meet you?”

He raised his arm from the elbow, hand up. “Stuart.” She squeezed his hand like it had juice in it she needed for something healthy to drink. “Ow. Say that again. Twa-waw-ayzeeah?”

“Close. Taw-eezh-ee-uh. You should see in Cyrillic. It becomes more clear for you.”

“No, I shouldn’t.” He rolled onto his right side dragging his left arm and shoulder. “Fuckin’ ow! Jesus.” He stared for a split second. “Do you like wax your entire body?”

“No. Only where you should not be looking so close if you are hurt.” She squinted in brief appraisal. “For those places you should be one hundred percent of yourself. You? Maybe one hundred and ten. Or twenty.” She leaned forward, pushed him over on his back, sat on his chest and frowned while she worked her hands over his left shoulder. Her bikini was one of those three poker chips and a couple of shoelaces jobs, and she didn’t wax everywhere. He knew because he was so engrossed in the way the sun and her body fuzz were working together with the perfumed coconut oil that she had to tell him twice to rotate his arm and shoulder.

“With you I repeat everything? Why is that? Nothing is broken, you will live. Something hit you?”

“You.”

“No. I am strong but I am a girl and not so hard to cause pain.”

He thought he might be getting that way and was glad when she stood and pulled him up by his right arm.

“Shirt.” She held out her hand, waited. He obeyed and she got right up on the non-bloody cross-shaped dark purple dent at the very top of his upper left arm. She walked off tip toe on her skates and re-set the trash barrel they’d knocked over, held his shirt sleeve up to where the welded angle iron support frame crossed in the front of the barrel, and nodded.

“Is here.” She pointed at her discovery and a rusty cross on his t-shirt sleeve, looked at him, pleased with her space case ice cream cone boy violently meets six-foot-four Amazon Russian skater girl train wreck forensics. She shook the shirt in his direction. “Is better you than me, no attention ice cream boy.”

“Any gentleman points for that?”

“Not today.” The backhanded t-shirt hit him in the face with some force. She bent over and started to pick up the trash scattered in their wreck. Jesus, she shouldn’t be…

He pulled the shirt on and squatted to help her with the trash, eyes wide. Sweet, sweet Jesus. He almost forgot about his shoulder before he suggested that she might follow his lead in the squat versus bend.

They dropped the last waxed coke cup and hot dog wrapper back in the can. She brushed her hands together, made a face, wiped and squeezed them on the back pockets of his Levis. Jeeeez-zus. She could charge for that.

“You have car? Mine is too far. I will drive. For X-rays. Come.”

“In skates?”

She stitched her eyebrows together, looked at him like he was the most pathetic dumbass on the planet. “Of course, I remove them before. I am smart Russian girl, not Polak joke person.”

“You have a license somewhere?” No more bikini than she had on he didn’t want to start guessing.

“Commercial. In my skate.” She let a small grin run across her face, looked at him like she knew what he’d been thinking.

“Cool.” He handed her his keys. “It’s a stick. Can you handle it?”

“Stick?” She spun his key ring into her palm. “All the men, they say to me, ‘Taisia, is like tree, can you handle it?’” She gave him a slightly crooked smile. “Today is good because at last I meet one honest American ice cream boy. I like you too much already.” The open-palm whack between his shoulder blades rattled his teeth. Jee-eez-us. He had towels in the trunk. He’d find a way to get her to sit on one and not get that oily business all over his seats.

***

Sunday, 10:47 AM – La Brea, CA

Burke noted the shocky teenage girl in a white apron sitting on the curb with a plainclothes female from Hollywood Division, thought it best to leave them alone. He flashed his badge at the uniform on yellow tape duty and swam upstream against a small army of exiting haz-mat suited forensics people and into the back of the La Brea Haagen-Dazs.

“Morning, Burke.” His task force partner Laschelle, a young black woman from the FBI , handed him a coffee.

“They open already?”

“Nope. I worked at a Farrells up in the Bay in high school. All the coffee machines are the same. I’m Federal. Who’s gonna complain?” She motioned him closer, lifted the lid on a three-gallon ice cream bucket.

“You’re female and black so somebody’ll get – Holy fucking…Goddammit…” Burke jerked his head up and back, collected himself before he looked back down at the severed head covered with walnuts in an otherwise empty French Vanilla ice cream bucket. “Anyone we know?”

“Another musician. Stuart O’Connell? Keyboard player in a two guitar band.”

“So he won’t be missed, at least vocationally.” He hit his coffee. Hot and perfect. He looked past it, raised his eyebrows in question marks.

“Uniforms found his car burned out in a West Hollywood alley. The bucket came from yesterday’s trash. He’s fresh.”

Burke gave the bucket’s contents a sideways glance. “This is what, five?”

“Six, if you count that one on the cactus at the Harbor Freeway onramp.”

“No note on that one, I’m still not sure. Walnuts are a nice touch. Any reason, you think?” He popped a stick of clove gum, offered.

“No thanks. Shit smells like funked up old shoes, Burke. Too early in the morning.”

“Sorry. The walnuts?”

“Who knows. Do you think there’s a reason for any of these?”

“I’m starting to think one of you is unhappy with my side of the gender line’s manners. Note?”

“Of course.”

“Prints?”

“Shit.” She rolled her eyes, handed him the index card, the note written in deep pink lipstick.

I got a calendar for Christmas full of stupid comments people that weren’t me have made. That one reminded me of a story.

This is what I travelled with as a synthesizer “Prophet” in 1983 (maybe ’84) except for young Nana Ballet. And a couple of cases that were out on loan. Airlines weren’t busting us for excess luggage back then so film and video crews and musicians could take a butt load of stuff. Fortunately time marched on, gear got smaller and smarter for all of us and modelled versions of what’s in all of those cases will run on an iPad Air. Also know that the “portable” MIDI equipped Commodore SX-64 had the distinction of being the first full color “portable” computer with a whopping five inch 16 color display. “Portable” was BS. Carrying it for any length of time would dislocate your shoulder.

I flew into the Midland International Air and Space Port, with these cases and a few more. I was afraid they would make me a little ostentatious, until I checked out the new, quarter million dollar Rolls Royce sitting in the airport lobby. 1983 dollars. Six hundred and twenty grand today. Ouch. Oil and money have been friends since the dinosaurs died. Long haired guys with flight cases were insignificant.

I loaded up, took the long walk to National, always the furthest rental car counter before the end of the world, to pick up keys for my not six hundred grand Cutlass, and grab a one page map. (Remember those?) Nobody wants to be lost in the Permian Basin.

The rental car gal was a true West Texas kinda girl. Tanned and a little leathery and bottle blonde, curious about the cases. I said “Electronic Music” and she made a face before she told me where “everybody” went dancin’ and drinkin’, if I was interested. Because most people were interested in that, you know, where to have a good time line dancin’ and drinkin’. I wasn’t interested, but thanked her anyway. I needed some of those drinkin’ and dancin’ fools at a synthesiszer clinic to cut down on what I feared was going to be a tumbleweeds and dust evening, with a few pocket protector guys thrown in for good measure. She handed me the keys, said “Honey, even if you can get all that stuff in a Cutlass, I’m not sure it’ll haul it. Good Luck.” She gave me the keys and a professional, not invitational, down home Texas gal wink.

The damn car caught fire before I was out of sight of the terminal. I mean right down the divided road on the way out. I stopped, pulled all the cases out and stacked them in the median about ten yards away. So they’d be safe in the event the Cutlass decided to go big BANG. I mean there was one of two existing prototypes in that pile of cases. Nobody was coming or going at the Space Port, so I hiked back to the counter. The rental girl didn’t even look up.

“Somethin’ wrong with your car, honey?”

“Yeah. It’s on fire.”

“So is fire a real problem?” Like people complained about her cars all the time looking for a discount or a free upgrade on a flimsy excuse. A dirty ashtray or gum on the brake pedal, sticky hair products on the headrest. She finished what she was doing, looked up and I pointed out the window to where the Cutlass was belching flames from both sides of the hood. “Well if that don’t beat the bugs out of a Motel 6 bedspread. Thought I’d heard every whiny ass complaint there was. Honest to God car’s on fire is a first.” All hell broke loose on the radios for a minute before she handed me the keys to a new Lincoln.

“I’ll take care of the contract, honey. You hurry back out there and load up your electric music things before the fire trucks have the whole damn road blocked off. You won’t be going nowhere for a while if that happens.” She grabbed another radio and added a little twinkle to the professional wink when she hip bumped the employee door open. “Told ya one of these new Cutlasses wouldn’t haul all that crap.”

The early Eighties were a terrible time for American made rental cars, except for Budget’s $29 deals on Lincolns. Trust me. Air and Space Port is the actual name of the Midland Airport.

I was asked for more Meyers. So here’s most of an honest-to-God chapter from “The Hot Girl”.

Cambridge U.K., Wednesday, June 13, 1979

“What the fuck?” Deanna shook the satiny bathrobe Michael handed her after she’d set her purse down and taken off her jacket.

“Can’t have you spoil the illusion by ‘in off the street to nude’ in front of everyone.” He put a hand between her shoulder blades and gave her a gentle shove toward a DIY four-panel room divider made of old doors. “Did you get my message about loose clothes, no underthings?”

“Yes, but…” She turned around and had to walk backwards because he was right there and kept coming. “But I hate braless, all bouncing around and cold and everything. Unless I’m just home or something. And no panties? I mean how gross is that? I mean it, what the fuck, Michael?”

“Tight clothes and elastic leave lines where a discerning eye would rather none.”

“So? I’m not a nude model.”

He pulled one of the end screen panels almost to the wall in front of himself to enclose her, stuck his head in. “You are tonight.”

“I am not! I don’t do the nudist thing. I did that once on accident water skiing and lost a sixty-dollar bikini. And six weeks of a summer with someone I was in…who was important.”

He pulled the screen panel open, stepped right into her face. “Shut it. Now. You took the forty. To model. What did you think they wanted to see? A skinny yank in out-sized clothes? You’ve nothing special to keep hidden away. On a right day you’re no more than a knackered mop stood on end.” His scowl intensified for a few seconds before it vanished when he glanced at the clock on the far wall. “They’re setting their places. Clothes or no clothes, on the stand or down the stairs, as you will. Six minutes.”

At seven-thirty she stepped around the edge of the screen of doors in the satiny robe, scared, timid, shaking and determined. Knackered mop? Insulting her pride to get her naked? Another gamey asshole trick. Mother fuc— she flashed the Miss Popularity smile that she had resurrected by necessity, stepped up onto a homemade riser covered in a worn-out oriental rug and topped with a faded Victorian bench. She slid out of the robe in a move she’d seen in some old black and white movie. Godammit, she couldn’t smile like this all night, and big-bottom Michael needed to turn the heater up. Way up. “Summer” in England was a lie.

Cambridge U.K., Wednesday, June 20, 1979

A room full of male and female pensioners, a perv professor and Michael had enjoyed spending three hours spread over two ninety-minute sessions with a too thin, starkly attractive, non-speaking naked young girl so frightened that you could see it in her eyes. She’d presented them with a vulnerability rarely seen in nude models, something Michael had captured with a camera so that he could paint her himself when he had time. The perv professor, Dr. David Childs, had logged that child-like fear as well.

“No, David.” Michael shook his head slowly and spoke like he was dealing with a four year-old. “The Fifty is for the ring to come and have a look, and the forty I’m out for getting her here.”

“Ninety, David. Or I’ll call Lady Childs for it and your financial situation will indelicately vaporize.”

David counted out the ninety, slapped them into Michael’s outstretched hand. “Beastly excuse for a man you are.”

“Comes with the under compensated instructor’s crown, you know that well enough.” Michael folded the bills and shoved them in his front pocket.

“She’s a bit of Bohemian, that’s something different. But I have several on my list ahead of her. You will keep her between us?”

“Our own private Bohemian rhapsody, David. I’ll let you know how she goes.”

Michael put his hand on David’s shoulder and ushered him out of the doorway he’d blocked with his lingering, said “Good Night” to his last pensioner and locked the door from the inside. Unlike Dr. Childs, he didn’t have a rich wife, a title, or a list of girls to work his way through before he got to this one.

“Michael?” Deanna tossed the robe over the top of the screen in another old movie move. “Are we going to talk about the cross curriculum symbolism? I made some time for us, and a list.”

He unzipped his pants and shoved the room divider open. “Knob bob time best served before wordplay, Miss Collings. I’d ask to have at down below but that’s a right lion’s head you’ve got between your legs.” He reached for her and his pants hit his ankles. Hers were only halfway up when she let go of them to slide out the backside of the screen and shuffled off to grab her purse, book bag and coat. Michael almost tripped backing out of the screen, and after two shuffle steps himself he grabbed the back of a chair, hop danced his feet out of captivity, lunged and caught her. She spun away from him, but her feet, still bound by her jeans, didn’t follow her. He caught her by the upper arm, dragged her to the riser and tossed her like a rag doll onto the ratty upholstered Victorian bench she’d modeled on. The good news was she’d lost the jeans along the way, the bad news was she bounced off the bench, down onto the riser, rolled to its edge feet first, and then off. She tried to stay up but her momentum, balance and sock feet were at cross purposes. In an effort to stay upright she clutched at an easel and when she knew she was on the way down, with or without it, she heaved the easel at one of the tall glass windows in the second story studio. The sound of the window shattering seemed to last for hours.

Michael picked her up, propped her on the riser. “Are you done?”

“Yes. No! I’m finished, not done. I’m not a fucking cake. Are you?”

“A cake? No, I’m not a bloody cake. Well done I am, thanks to you.” He looked through the hole where the window had been while he pulled on his baggy pants and reloaded his shirt tail. Deanna had never heard so many different emotions in the word “shit” before. Maybe it was an artist thing. She heard the sirens and said it herself.

***

“No ma’am. Really. I didn’t ‘fancy’ him. At all.” Deanna had been through the interview three times and wanted to go home. Before the sun came up. She leaned her head next to the police woman’s and lowered her voice. “He’s got a big butt, for a guy. You know? I don’t know about you, but my dream guy isn’t shaped like a pear.”

The WPC snorted into the back of her hand so hard she dropped her pen. “Very well. You’re not being formally charged with anything, Miss Collings. If you change your mind you might still give us ring about him.” She looked over at the lead officer who nodded. “Pick up your things, Miss Collings. You may go. Quietly.”

Deanna shouldered her way around the red-faced lorry driver whose windscreen had gotten smashed when the easel dropped into the street, two uniformed policemen who chuckled at her and a no-nonsense looking man in a lightweight rain jacket who reminded her of someone she thought she’d seen before.

Michael said “Good night” again, this time to the police contingent, found himself alone with the no-nonsense man who volunteered to help tape cardboard over the broken window.

No-nonsense used his teeth to tear a piece of duct tape from the roll he was holding, held it up to the wall while Michael pushed the cardboard into place.

“Busy night for an art teacher.”

“Bloody stupid fucking skinny cow. Forty pounds to stand about naked, not a thank you in her. And I’m done for the window.”

“Insurance will have the lorry’s windscreen, all’s fair. You pushed her, and they’re not all up for an indifferent shag. I’ll have the film roll, if you don’t mind.”

“You’ll be?”

“Meyers.” He ran the strip of tape down the side of the cardboard in a quick, smooth motion.

“Well, Meyers,” Michael held the right side of the cardboard up and waited for tape. “I do mind. I shot it, it’s mine and I’ll have my forty again and more out of her, one way or another.”

“Or…One way or another I’ll have the film. Day’s end, Michael? This window was all of yours needed breaking on a Cambridge summer’s eve.”

Out of the corner of his eye Michael took in his helper, snapped to the fact that nude photos of the girl and some possible extra income from them weren’t worth a trip to the emergency room. They swapped out holding the cardboard and Michael took a couple of steps to a cluttered desk. He rummaged around, popped the film from his camera and tossed it to Meyers. “She was just another nude model who turned out to be a bit of bad idea. Who is she to you?”

“All I know is someone who worries puts money in my account. Still early days for her and me.” The film disappeared into Meyers’ pocket. “That said,” he tore another piece of tape with his teeth. “She appears to be a girl who canturn a bit of bad idea into a shit grenade. Tape?”

She stood in the window, interlaced her fingers, stretched her arms over her head and yawned. The late summer, warm, close, made her long, silk nightgown almost too much to be wearing against the sun. Three months ago she had been Amanda Vincent. Barely twenty-two, Masters with Honors from Cambridge and madly in love enough with a beautiful French-Italian playboy to walk out in the middle of her M.Phil in International Finance. This late Monday morning she was young bride of three months Amanda Morisé, daydreaming out the window of a third-floor Montmartre apartment at the noise and dust of Paris, the memory of day long lovemaking fresh in her mind. A light knock on the door brought her back to Earth.

She answered the knock to find a young woman similar in age and style, wearing a soft cotton summer dress, hair pulled up loosely against the heat, her arms down, crossed at the wrists, waiting. She had the bluest eyes Amanda had ever seen.

“Amanda? Amanda Morisé?” Obvious from the sound of her voice her visitor was very French. And on the verge of impatience overcoming her mannered demeanor. “Je peut entrer? To speak a moment? A matter I think most important?”

Amanda was still somewhere between her daydreams and the young woman standing in the open door. “Yes. Yes…of course…My manners escape me…” As her visitor passed she thought that if whatever was holding her guest’s hair together let go, it might just explode off her head.

“You possess the mind of his charm, Madame,” her guest said as she passed. “I am Alixandrie. It is too formal, I agree. I am called Alix. As in your America, now we shake the hands, oui?” The blue-eyed girl’s English was much better than Amanda’s French. Alix declared a halt to further polite formalities and launched into a story, told in a series of broken sentences wrenched from the center of her being. Some tears were shed in the telling and it ended with “I believe you also are married to my husband, Yannick Morisé.”

“No, that’s quite impossible,” Amanda’s tone completely dismissive of Alix’s story of a whirlwind romance followed closely by betrayal. “I know you’re upset, but you’ve made a mistake. I’m sorry for whatever your husband may have done, but my husband left just this morning for Marseille. His name is Yannick, but it’s not an unusual name, neither is Morisé.” Her daydreams returned, she saw them eating breakfast together, barely clothed, he spanked her lightly on her behind as she walked past him with her coffee. How, as he was leaving, he had bent over, dropped an end of his tie down her robe, raised his eyebrows, smiled when it followed him as he stood after a quick, deep kiss goodbye.

“No! No, I tell you he is in a house in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, half of one hour’s train ride from Paris. He believes I have come to Paris to discover an answer of my pregnancy. You are assured, Madame Morisé, I am not with child. I have come to meet you, the wife he married two weeks after me. Of treachery as such, be most assured!”

Alix removed a note card from her black leather clutch with an address in Saint-Germain printed at the top. “I am not believed? By you, his beautiful American woman? Tomorrow he will be away the day. If not for you, perhaps another wife? The Mademoiselle of flowers waits in the road from the station of trains. Show her this.” She took Amanda’s hand and smashed the card in her palm. “She will show the way to you. Tomorrow.” Her face softened. “Offer her kindness, please, the young girl of flowers. If what is discovered in Saint-Germane you cannot believe? No more will I speak of it to you.”

The blue of Alix’s eyes burned through the redness of recent tears straight into Amanda’s own before she gently moved a strap of Amanda’s nightgown back onto her shoulder, turned and walked quietly away. The soft fragrance of fresh flowers followed her. She put Amanda in mind of a small, beautifully sad garden as she pulled the door closed softly behind her, not quite closing it all the way.

Amanda looked at the card. Quite a girl, and even more of a story. Yes, Yannick had married her in a quiet civil ceremony, that was true. Often accused by the press of squandering his inheritance on a laundry list of immoral pursuits, he’d told her he needed no more publicity. That it was best his enemies, even his friends, not know that he now had such a beautiful wife. She had agreed. He could get her to do whatever he wanted. The things he said, the things he did to her, with her…It was all a lie. It must be. A jealous girlfriend with a story, attempting to start some girl nonsense. She would go to Saint-Germaine in the morning and get the truth from the lovely little French girl with her wild hair, blue eyes, and pathetic little lie.

***

When shown the card, the flower girl said “Oh, Oui,” and spoke rapidly and only in French that she knew the way, offered to walk with Amanda.

“No, thank you.” Amanda tried to politely extricate her hand from the flower girl’s. “I prefer the quiet. It’s so unlike Paris.” She tried in English, and her best French, the flower girl not understanding. Amanda finally said, “Mercì” for the all the girl’s pointing and handed her a silver 10 Franc coin, which made the flower girl squeal, take Amanda’s hand back and kiss it until it Amanda pulled it away.

The tiny house was no more than a half a mile from the station, off a narrow street. She passed through the hedge wall in front and knocked with purpose. Alix answered and the door opened into a cool, dark room. Amanda wanted to say “Show me your evidence, tell me your tale, cry and let me leave. My husband will be home tomorrow.” Alix’s blue eyes were burning, lighting up the dark entryway. Amanda decided she might be better served with tact. It wouldn’t kill her to be polite. The girl was obviously hurt, give her a chance. Hear her out. It was a lovely village, so quiet after Paris, and Alix’s cottage was remarkably cool.

“I have said you are most beautiful,” Alix pulled the runaway strands of Amanda’s hair from her cheek, pushed them gently behind her ear. “Sad, no? Two beautiful women should meet such as this, our lives entwined in deceit.”

“I’m still certain there’s been a mistake of some kind, I —” Alix’s touch had been light as a feather, warm and cool at the same time…

“I talk too much to you, his beautiful American woman. See your ‘husband,’ Yannick Morisé. Come.”

Amanda had heard at Cambridge, mostly by way of racial innuendo, that French girls were temperamental, hot headed. Meaner than Spanish girls, smarter than English girls, sexier than Italian girls. This was always said by someone in a pub, in a fake French accent. It might just be true.

She followed Alix down a short hallway to a small bedroom dominated by a double bed, the window at the foot of it open where a light breeze drifted in, bringing with it a garden awash in flowers. It felt like home should feel. No, this wasn’t Paris. A view of trees some ten yards distant replaced the dusty haze that surrounded the Eiffel tower. The soft rustling of the hedge, the flowers. It was serene, like she was inside of poetry, so –

Alix practically ripped the doors off a double armoire, banged them violently on the cabinet’s side. Inside, Yannick’s signature blousy, white collarless shirts he had handmade in Florence hung there in testament to his presence. His white collared dress shirt from the High Street in Oxford. No…Surely, they weren’t her Yannick’s. They couldn’t be.

Alix picked up a man’s lacquered jewelry box, dumped the contents on the armoire’s shelf and tossed the box to the floor. Amanda recognized a familiar pair of cufflinks, the Tissot watch she had bought him as a wedding gift. No, no, no…She lifted the watch as if it were unreal, turned it over to see the “Love Always, C.A.M.” she’d had engraved on the back. Shaking she tugged on a shirt, softly at first, then violently, ripping it from its hanger to stare blankly at the tailor’s mark on the bottom. YFM, a number. It was true. It was all true. The compact bundle of electric French girl had told her the truth.

Alix saw her start to fold and set her on the edge of the bed, keeping her hands on Amanda’s shoulders. “No more tears. No more for this bastard, our ‘husband,’ will there be tears. Your Father has wealth I am certain?”

“Yes.” She felt dizzy, sick…

“As also mine. This Yannick desires above beauty or sex, our money to waste. Do not faint on me, Amanda. The steps we take now most severe. To destroy him. He will not destroy us.” She looked Amanda in the eye, shook her shoulders. “We have the means. In France also the women may judge these things. Divorce him together, destroy him together. Together ee shame this misery of women from the face of France!”

Alix left the room and returned with brandy in a water glass, gave it to Amanda and waited a few minutes for it to hit. When Amanda had calmed, Alix walked with her slowly, held her hand all the way to the station where they sat together on a worn, wooden bench and waited for the train. “Be strong for us,” Alix whispered when she kissed Amanda on the cheek before releasing her to board the train. “Be. Strong.”

***

Alix had said “We must be taken ill when he returns to us. He cannot touch us. No sex, no control, unable to attend the bank for him? He will go mad.” Amanda stuck to her orders from Alix, feigned “ill”, kept her mouth shut while her anger and her heart simmered into a slow boil for the two days Yannick was home before he was off to Florence on “business.”

Amanda had not only inherited her father’s money, but her one character flaw as well. Impatience. She didn’t wait well, didn’t like, as her father had said, to “let shit ride.” Now she’d let some sweet talking, hot love making pretty boy French bastard take over her body, her mind, her very soul. Let him blind her, blindside her, and marry her just two weeks after he’d married a wild, rich, blue-eyed French girl. Who the hell did he think he was?

Whatever Yannick’s business in Italy, it had been unpleasant. On his return he was irritable, needed a shave, needed a shower, wanted a woman. He drank champagne from the bottle, directed loud, profane insults at Amanda in three languages, asked her why did he have a sick wife he couldn’t fuck? She lost it. Told him she knew. About Alix, about all of it. Because some “arrogant, idiot, dickless bastard had left a watch in a cottage in Saint-Germain.” She called him “the most useless piece of shit excuse for a man ever born.” An outburst that left her on the floor of their bathroom semi-conscious with a broken jaw, a cracked cheekbone and two fewer teeth than she’d had that Sunday morning. Lying on the floor, consciousness fading, all she could think of was Alix. Unaware, alone, and directly in Yannick’s path. He had stormed out in such a rage. He was dangerous. Alix needed to get away…To be safe…Amanda passed out thinking of her, of Alix, the French girl with those blue, blue eyes.

Yannick arrived in Saint-Germaine, at least as drunk and more self-righteously enraged than when he’d left Paris. Alix refused to let him in, but she did let him make enough noise pounding on the door and screaming profanity at her in three languages to wake her neighbors. He found an axe leaning against the woodpile, used it to break down the front door. When he was at last standing inside, dripping sweat, Yannick raised the axe and with a dozen or so neighbors looking on, Alix screamed “No! S’il vous plaît!”

The Axe made it to the top of it’s arc, Yannick took half a step toward her, Alix shot him four times with the Walther PPK her father had taken from a dead German officer in 1944. He dropped to his knees, the axe falling pulled him backwards into a cavernous silence.

Alix dropped the pistol on Yannick’s body when she stepped over it and through the splintered door into the late summer night. She would take the next train to Paris, find the beautiful American woman and tell her the good news. Tell her how a passionate, blue eyed French girl with impossible hair had begun to feel about her, see what she thought about that.

“Men do tend to talk about things on a much higher level. Many of my male colleagues, when they go to the House floor, you know, they’ve got some pie chart or graph behind them and they’re talking about trillions of dollars and, you know, how the debt is awful and, you know, we all agree with that . . . We need our male colleagues to understand that if you can bring it down to a woman’s level and what everything that she is balancing in her life—that’s the way to go.”

Representative Renee Ellmers (R-North Carolina)

I knew there was a reason for certain states to spend too much time worrying about which restroom people can use. And to think no permit is required to carry a handgun in North Carolina.

Brian at Bonnywood Manor wrote a post with a great scene in it (See #4) that I plugged into a throwaway chapter. Thank you, Brian. I might turn it into a series. Meyers – Mercenary Detective? Nah. It was a dark and not so stormy night…

Cambridge, U.K. – Early October 1982

Meyers checked his watch, thought about a cigarette for the hundredth time in the last half hour. And food. Food would be good. But he’d have to step out of the phone box and into the drizzly Cambridgeshire soup. It didn’t look like much, but it got right through everything but a wharfman’s oilskin and right down into your bones. His not so new, or all that clean London Fog was perfect for playing the “Mercenary Detective” on his business card. Or baby sitter, which was what he was. On this job, anyway. Regardless, the overcoat wouldn’t keep him dry, and he had to wait for his charge to appear. He’d stay smoke and food free for a while, pick up what he needed walking in the shadows behind her if she ventured back out tonight. Assuming she made it home in one piece.

Why anyone gave a rat’s ass about a skinny American girl who could get knee deep in her own shit simply walking down the street going to Cambridge for a grad degree was beyond him. Was she pretty? He’d seen pictures. She had a Gran’s porcelain doll look to her. So yeah, before the hair cut with pinking shears, and back when she maybe ate occasionally. The American who handed her off said it would help if she didn’t dress like Redneck Lesbian Barbie most days, all in thrift shop men’s clothes that she threw an oversized old lady dress over. He’d been told she was smart, too. Couldn’t prove it by him. He was starting to question his own judgement to take up station in the phone box and wait for her to make it home. The silly cow was always getting into –

“About bloody time.” He rubbed a peek-a-boo hole in the fogged glass of the phone box so he could see her, checked his watch again.

Deanna fumbled with the door latch. She knew it was going to piss her off, like always. Dammit. Everything in England was a hundred and fifty fucking years old, at least. And that Stonehenge thing? Don’t even. How could anyone not know how it got there? Like it just appeared in some farmer’s back yard? Jesus. How stupid was that? Someone had to know. And Blake’s house on Molton Street in London? It was a fucking bar. With French sandwiches, which really meant yukky, fatty English ham, tasteless hydroponic tomatoes and runny mayo on a croissant. And sweet, colorful drinks. She’d been. Once. Gotten thrown out. That had been a long afternoon. She’d met a lot of nice police women, but that was it.

“Come on. Godammit, open.” The cold drip from the useless, narrow awning over the door was going straight between her collar and her neck. She looked around for a place to set the paper bag full of off-fresh veggies she’d bargained for at the green grocer’s, settled on the basket of one of the half dozen bicycles on the tiny strip of sidewalk in front of her flat.

Meyers’ gentleman instincts kicked in, but there was nothing he could do to help her. “Let her screw up until it gets dangerous,” the woman had said. “Stay out of the way and off her radar. If you need to show some horny, overly enthusiastic asshole the big book of manners, do it in the background.” What the hell. The girl drew her fair share of ‘Bohemian Babes are for me’ horn dogs, but none of them were very dangerous. Questionable taste in women, maybe, but not dangerous. He didn’t get it. The people who hung around colleges. Forever. He was starting to feel like one of them. It paid like a real job, though. He stuck a stick of gum in his mouth, hoped it lasted longer than two minutes, checked his watch. Again.

“If you don’t –” She bumped the stubborn door with her hip when she twisted the key and the solid wood door with a thousand coats of paint banged open, dropped her into the flat on her hands and knees. She straightened her legs, butt in the air, brought the rest of herself up like a mechanical mime and stepped out into the soup to grab her veggies. When she turned back she kicked the door and yelled “Cock sucker!” loud enough for Meyers to hear it inside the phone box.

His handler had told him that back in the States she’d grown up with a brother who played linebacker in the NFL and she had lived with a musician. She had a mouth on her to prove those up. And despite dumping the musician on her way to the airport bound for England’s green and pleasant land she was still in love with him. “Poor bastard,” he’d said. The woman said not to feel too sorry for him, he was getting a well deserved vacation and that he was the only bloke who could wrangle her. Meyers could use some advice on that shrew wrangling. The girl was a bad judgement accident magnet with feet.

***

Deanna decided to come out again, looking almost female. Meyers dutifully followed her to a posh, second floor flat further north up the Cam. There were no convenient phone boxes so he decided to drink cheap wine while doing his best to blend in at a party of obviously not very discriminating people of varying ages. Who were only there to drink some rich Spanish kid’s free, sweet, shitty white wine. And eat his free, greasy, shitty oven-fired hors devours that kept popping out of an oven somewhere around a corner before being put up on a table strewn with paper plates, balled up dirty paper napkins and empty plastic wine glasses. The greasy bites were delivered by a thin, underage pimply faced boy who, if he were to wash his hair more than once a month, would see his complexion miraculously clear up.

Meyers was reaching for some Americanized eggroll looking thing when he was jolted out of his shampoo reverie by a sonic boom that had probably been heard across the channel.

Everyone was staring at the balcony sliding glass door, and Deanna, as her face slid down the glass. The slow trip pulled her upper lip off her teeth in a comic snarl and left a smeared streak of icing from the piece of cake she had been eating in its wake. Meyers waited to see if she slumped, or got up. She stayed down. Dammit. He set his wine glass with fifteen others on an end table whose varnish had long since worn away and took a step, stopped and picked up his wine while he still knew which glass was his. Sheridan, the gay theology guy in the clergy cassock with contrasting white button trim, who followed her and other attractive female misfits around for reasons unknown, was already on her.

“Deanna? Dee-anna! Miss Collings?”

“Mmmphhh?”

“Good. You must stand up Miss Collings. Please. This is, um, unbecoming. Please.”

“Mmmnguhhhphhhumpin?”

“Yes, exactly.” He put his hands under her arms, straight and stiff, karate chop style, to avoid a couple of handfuls of her boobs. More for show, Meyers thought, but it was decent of him. Gay and soon to be priestly. Or making a good show of both until he got out into a pasture full of sheep in need of shepherding. Smart lad, and well played if that was his game.

Deanna stood, dazed, with what little lipstick she wore in a red line from the left corner of her mouth to up under her eye. Her upper lip and both nostrils were covered in blue and white cake icing, which had also managed to find her eyelashes and eyebrows. Picasso clown meets Sixties movie vampire. In pastels.

“Didn’t you see the door?” Sheridan wiped a finger of icing off her left eye lid, sucked it off his finger.

“Said it again, Father Fag, ‘love.’ And no one’s taking me up on it, are they?” She shook her head, looked around, cleared her eyes and pushed back a step from the glass door. “God. What an idiot…” She put her hand on the aluminum frame, stuck her head around the side of the glass door.

“Dimas! Hey! Dumbass! Motherfucker put some little stars or butterflies or unicorn sticky thing decals on this door, ‘Kay, asshole?” She rubbed her lip, came away with a touch of blood from her nose mixed in the icing, held it up. “Jesus, you know? I could have fucking killed myself.”

Meyers heard the mumbled “Don’t we wish” comments from members of her various study groups float around him like gnats on a moldy orange. Good thing she knew she couldn’t drink or she’d be a right mess.

He reloaded his wine while priest-to-be fawned all over her, working the icing out of her nose with a paper napkin wrapped pinkie finger. She was swatting at him, telling him to fuck off, rubbing her lip and nose looking for more blood, giving anyone who stared at them too long the finger. Meyers checked his watch. She’d be in bed soon enough after this little number, and he’d have an early night of it. This job did have its perks. Decent hours. Occasionally chatty girls on the periphery of whatever Deanna was getting up to. Unless tonight was the night priest-to-be offered to bathe her. That would fuck everything up, having to be discrete about knocking him into the shrubs or the Cam with enough force to send him back to gay for a while. He’d keep his head down, blame the fog for his bash into the black frock. He’d run off with her swearing at him, the priest —

There she went, wiping cake all over the priest-to-be’s frock and calling him a boob honking pervert for trying to wipe the cake off the front of her dress. Shit. What he needed was a standard issue who’s shagging the other divorce case. Motel rooms, half empty champagne bottles and forgotten panties instead of a profane, clumsy female grad student who rarely shagged anyone. And if she did she never left him flat, room temperature champagne. Or her panties.

She was getting her raincoat, and the priest-to-be was staying. Good. He glanced at his watch again, and at the greasy, disgusting, thumb sized cold egg roll thing making his fingers shiny. He flicked it out the open patio door and over the balcony rail like it was the butt of a cheap cigar. Which reminded him that he still needed a cigarette. And food. Real food from a reasonably attractive, friendly and zit free waitress would be good.